Part of a series: Buildings That Protest

Over the course of the last 3 posts, we proceeded from eco-feedback mechanisms to a paranoid vision of automated prisons and crowd control. It’s worth taking a moment to step back and consider the plausibility of all of this. How likely are these things? Would we do it?

Of course we would

To make grand architecture is to shape the world in your image, in the hopes that it will in turn shape people. This can be benevolently nudging the population in one direction, or forcing them into another, but that’s simply a question of degrees. To remake a space is to make an ethical claim on how that space should be used, by whom, and for what purpose. At every step along the way, builders have used cutting-edge technologies to bring their manifestos to life.